D&SCRN
NEWSLETTER NO. 1, MARCH 2000
NATO
"HUMANITARIAN" BOMBING DISASTER AND HUMANITARIAN AID
Humanitarian excuses for military
aggression
Government leaders of 19 NATO member states proceeded on March 24 1999 with the
execution of their October 1998 threats to bombard Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. They justified their flagrant violation of fundamental principles
of international law, the UN Charter, the NATO charter itself and the
constitutions of some member states, claiming that there was urgent need to
stop the "humanitarian crisis" and "ethnic cleansing" of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija, southern province of the Yugoslav
Republic of Serbia. The official report written in one NATO member state just
two months before the bombing began, affirmed that actions of the Yugoslav
security forces were "not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an
ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent"1,
and indicate that NATO leaders consciously intervened in the armed conflict
within the sovereign country on the side of armed insurgents against the
central government.
Humanitarian disaster caused by
"humanitarian" bombing
As it could have been only predicted, the bombardment transformed already a
very difficult humanitarian situation into a humanitarian disaster. Until June
9 1999, NATO aircraft flew 26,300 sorties and dropped 23,000 tons of
explosives, including forbidden cassette bombs and those "enriched"
with depleted uranium with long-term destructive effects on human health and
the environment.
Direct civilian casualties of 78 days and nights of bombing (out of around 2000
killed, one third were children and one twelfth refugees), were greater than
the combined civilian and armed casualties of the conflict between the
Albania-infiltrated-with-Mafia forces and the foreign secret services
narco-money-connected Kosovo Liberation Army terrorist troops2 and
the Yugoslav government forces during the entire period preceding the bombing.
Instead of few tens of thousands of internally displaced but sheltered persons
estimated by OESCE observation mission in Kosovo and Metohija in the days
before it withdrew to clear the way for the bombing,
few hundreds of thousands of uprooted refugees poured into surrounding
countries and northern Yugoslavia after the bombing began.
After arrival of KFOR in Kosovo and Metohija on 10 June 1999, ethnic Albanian
refugees who did not succeed to emigrate into Western countries, returned to
Kosovo and Metohija. Due to uncontrolled borders, along with the refugees
illegally immigrated Albanians who never lived in Kosovo and Metohija, but
availed themselves of the opportunity to loot or settle on the property of
expelled local inhabitants. UN envoy Bernard Kouchner, violating the mandate of
UN resolution 1244 that provided for the disarmament of KLA, transformed it
into the Kosovo Defense Corps and some of their leaders who had been accused
for war crimes were promoted into local administration and even judiciary
officials. These measures tacitly encouraged and legalized killings (4 victims
a day on average), abductions, beatings and expulsion of Serbs, Romany,
Goranci, Muslims and Albanians who did not agree with KLA terrorist methods of
creation of an ethnically pure Greater Albania .3
Violence, crime and insecurity in Kosovo and Metohija after arrival of KFOR and
UNMIK, increased the number of refugees in FR Yugoslavia by 40%. There are 700
000 "old" refugees, driven out in 1995 from their ancestral homes in
secessionist Republics Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the active support
of NATO aircraft and US retired generals as instructors. These refugees are not
being repatriated into Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as they should have
been according to the 1995 Dayton agreement. The greatest burden of refugees'
accommodation costs is still born by the families that received 90% of them in
their homes. Five percent of the dwindling GNP spent yearly by the FRY
government to cover the costs of humanitarian aid, health care, education and
public utilities, was practically the only source of help for refugees and
displaced persons In the first years of the violent dismemberment of
Yugoslavia.
The total number of refugees is increased by around 250 000 "new"
refugees from Kosovo and Metohija since the bombing4
NATO bombardment has also contributed to an increase of poverty and
unemployment rates. In addition, it led to a further decrease of the per capita
income below 900 US$ per year and pushed around two million people below the
poverty line. Before the bombardment there were already 800,000 unemployed
workers and 600, 000 redundant workers on "forced leave" (?),
attempting to get by through activity in the so called gray economy5.
Due to the bombardment, around 500, 000 people lost their jobs because 995
establishments were destroyed or damaged in the course of the NATO campaign.
Among them are 50 hospitals and ambulances, 300 schools and kindergartens, 100
major chemical and petrochemical installations 50 major metal industry and food
processing plants. In Kragujevac's automobile industry Zastava alone, 32, 000
work places were directly and 40, 000 were indirectly destroyed6.
Denial, reduction and conditioning of
humanitarian help
In spite of the drastically increased need for humanitarian help, some
governments in NATO member countries and international humanitarian
non-governmental organizations located in them, received significant part of
their funds from them and performed for them intelligence gathering services in
return.7 Some of them even campaigned against those who did help and
restricted their own assistance and services to the victims of the conflict.
For instance, the French-based international NGO "Medecins Sans
Frontieres", the medical relief group which even won the 1999 Nobel peace
prize, expelled its Greek branch just for following the MSF's charter and
sending doctors to Serbia to help warring sides regardless of their ethnicity.8
(Reuters, October 21 1999). According to the testimony of Malcolm Fraser from
Australian CARE, both United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies were, and
still are, under pressure, particularly from the US and Britain, to reduce the
programs in Serbia.9
The coordinator for the humanitarian help in FR Yugoslavia John Rouch declared
that total aid of these two largest humanitarian organizations amounted to 320
million Swiss franks in 1999 or 8.3 US$ per recipient monthly.10
This is more than four times smaller than the amount spent per refugee by the
UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the refugee camps set up for Albanians in
neighboring countries after bombardment began ($1.23 daily). Still a smaller
amount, just 11 cents a day if at all, is spent in Africa.11
Together with the TV cameras, humanitarian help was redirected from the
"old" humanitarian crisis in Eritrea and Somalia, to the newly staged
one in the Balkans. Even the refugees affiliated to the ethnic group favored by
the donors from NATO countries, received little in comparison to about 3.5 billion
US$ spent on ten weeks of bombardment, during which Albanian refugees were also
killed.
Data on the humanitarian help in kind, contributed by international donors and
distributed by the Red Cross of Yugoslavia, show the greatest decrease of help
in the case of ECHO, the European Community Humanitarian Office. It reduced the
help in sugar, edible oil and beans from 6 896 403 kg in 1998 to 512 880kg in
the first half of 1999. Thanks mostly to the doubling of the help in kind by
the World Food Program and other donors, humanitarian aid nevertheless can be
expected for about 350 000 "old" refugees, 200 000 newly displaced
persons and more than 300. 000 socially disadvantaged local inhabitants.
The political pressures to reduce to a minimum, or even block the humanitarian
aid necessary for survival, are present in the most inhumane form in the US and
EU embargo imposed even on the import of oil for heating, indispensable after
the NATO bombardment destroyed or damaged one third of Serbia's power grid, two
thirds of the oil refineries, as well as the central thermal plants in New
Belgrade and Kragujevac. The recent program of "oil for democracy"
makes aid contingent upon the recipients' political orientation. The
"help" which consisted of just twelve trucks filled with oil came
long after the heating season had begun and was sent through a shady private
company to two municipalities where opposition parties attained the majority in
the last local assembly elections. Such amount of oil can secure about three
days of municipal heating in the exceptionally cold 1999/2000 winter. If it
were not for the extraordinary results in the rebuilding and repairing of the
infrastructure through the efficient mobilization of internal resources and for
the delivery of gas from Russia, the Yugoslav people would be confronted with a
situation of mass deaths-a disaster on the top of another disaster.
Sanctions as blockade of social
disaster relief
For eight years now, leaders of NATO member countries are doing all in their
power to prevent, through economic sanctions, the reconstruction and
acceleration of the economic activity in Yugoslavia as the only viable disaster
relief policy for the rooting out of poverty, the accommodation and integration
of refugees. The UN representatives of NATO countries supported the
introduction of a blockade of FR Yugoslavia in 1992 through a UN Security
Council Resolution. Representatives of Russia and China did not veto it in the
expectation of credits from IMF, even though the resolution was obviously based
on the untenable implicit assumption that the FR of Yugoslavia was the only
guilty party for the civil war in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and
that only the Serb people did not have the right to self-determination. In the
NATO-controlled media, the Serbs were demonized as "aggressors" in
the regions where they lived and owned the land for centuries.12 The
sanctions also prohibited economic, scientific, technological, educational,
sports and cultural co-operation with the FR of Yugoslavia. Finally, these
sanctions contributed to the fall of per capita income in the country of 10.5
million inhabitants from around 3,200 US$ in 1989 to 1,100 US$ in 1993.
As soon as the economy started to recover in the period 1994-7, due to the
elimination of hyper-inflation through original economic stabilization program
and due to the suspension of sanctions after signing of the Dayton agreement in
1995, the sanctions were reintroduced in 1998. The EU and the US revoked the
preferential treatment of Yugoslav goods, placed a ban on investment in
Yugoslavia and on Yugoslav airways' flights to and from the FR of Yugoslavia,
froze Yugoslav funds abroad and restricted payment operations. As a consequence
industrial output attained in 1998 fell below the 1997-98 levels.13
Economic motives of bombardment and
sanctions
The choice of infrastructure, communication, civilian and industrial
bombardment targets, as well as the restriction and conditioning of
humanitarian help after having provoked humanitarian disaster through
bombardment, all point out to the conclusion that the real motives for
"humanitarian" NATO intervention are not humanitarian at all. For
lack of space, they can be only briefly summarized here.14 Aside
from the geo-strategic interest to control the important transportation and
trade crossroads, there is also the interest of trans-national capital and the
industrial-military complex concentrated in NATO countries to get new orders
for profitable arms production. The aim is the expansion of quasi-colonial
protectorates into the Balkans and further eastward, toward the oil rich
Caspian region. In these new dependencies their "high
representatives" under the cover of the United Nations arbitrarily change
elected local leaders, censor local media and forbid non-compliant parties from
participating in the elections, in order to silence all opposition to
appropriation of local assets, elimination of the local production where
it exists and the flooding of the local markets with the surplus production of
transnational corporations' sweat shops around the globe, including the new
protectorates themselves.
Conclusion
The practice of denial, reduction and political conditioning of humanitarian
help exemplify the negation of basic humanitarian values of civilized societies
which NATO leaders claimed they were defending.
Imperialistic motives, war-disaster exacerbating policies and the blockade of
economic development which is the most effective social disaster relief policy,
are endangering the survival of humanity in the new millennium.
Notes
1 January 12, 1999
intelligence report of the Foreign Office to the administrative Court of Trier,
Germany, Az: 514-516.80/32 426, http://web.archive.org/web/20030501103840/http://www.jungewelt.de/1999/04-24/011.shtml
)
2 (Hedges, Michael; "KLA may not be the perfect ally", http://web.archive.org/web/20030501103840/http://www.nandotimes.com/Kosovo/)
3 "Kosovo slipping into anarchy, Reuters, July 19, 1999.
4 "Humanitarian Situation in Yugoslavia & Activities of the Yugoslav
Red Cross", Yugoslav Survey, no. 3, November 1999.
5 Report on Human Development, Economic Institute, Belgrade, 1997
6 (NATO crimes in Yugoslavia -documentary evidence, Ed. Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Belgrade, bd. I and II).
7 ("Sins of the secular missionaries", The Economist, January 29,
2000
8 (Reuters, October 21 1999
9 "Yugoslav lives are as precious as any" The Australian, 7 January
2000
10 Odgovor(Reply),(Belgrade) 13 Jan. 2000
11 ("Relief Camps for Africans, Kosovars Worlds Apart", http://web.archive.org/web/20030501103840/http://www.latimes.com/CNS_DAYS/990521/t000045600.html)
12 Vera Vratusa(-Zunjic The Intrinsic Connection Between Endogenous and
Exogenous Factors of Social (dis)Integration - a Sketch of Yugoslav Case,
Dialogue (Paris), nos. 22 & 23).
13 Economic Survey, ed. Federal Office of Development and Economic Policy,
Yugoslav Survey, Belgrade, 1999)
14 (Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, "Opposite theoretical interpretations of NATO
bombardment of Yugoslavia in the light of the critique of ideology",
Socioloski pregled (Sociological Review) (Belgrade), no. 1-2, 1999) phone: +
38111 - 3282-141
Vera Vratusa-(Zunjic)
FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, Department of Sociology
Cika Ljubina 18-20, 11OOO Beograd, Yugoslavia
fax: + 38111 - 639-356
phone: + 38111 - 3282-141
e-mail: vvratusa@dekart.f.bg.ac.yu or vratusaz@afrodita.rcub.bg.ac.yu